APPROPRIATING THE ACTIONS OF ANOTHER - IMPLICATIONS FOR CHILDRENS MEMORY AND LEARNING

Perspectives on reality monitoring and sociocultural learning were int egrated in four studies of children's memory of contributions to the o utcomes of collaborative exchanges. Children made collages with an adu lt, and were later surprised with a reality-monitoring task in which t hey were asked to remember who placed particular pieces on the collage . In three of the four studies, 4-year-olds were more likely to claim they contributed pieces that the adult actually contributed rather tha n the reverse (Experiments 1-3). This bias was interpreted as evidence for appropriation, a process in which individuals adopt another perso n's actions as their own. The extent to which children committed misat tribution errors depended on their involvement as decision makers (Exp eriments 1 and 3) and on the outcomes of the collages themselves (Expe riment 2). Importantly, misattribution errors were not simply an expre ssion of encoding failures or response biases (Experiment 4). Implicat ions of these findings for children's memory and learning are discusse d.